Juno News - February 12, 2021


A closer look at Facebook's new COVID-19 misinformation rules


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

180.86192

Word Count

768

Sentence Count

24


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I want to chat with you for a moment about Facebook introducing new COVID-19 misinformation
00:00:10.560 community standards, releasing the list of criteria that they're going to use to determine
00:00:16.260 posts need to be removed. One cannot discuss this on Facebook. You must be punished. They put forward
00:00:22.640 about half a dozen new rules, and I want to bring up just two of them for you right now. One of them
00:00:28.360 is that they're going to remove posts of people who are claiming that coronavirus is no worse than
00:00:34.420 the flu, and they just put that right there. That's the description, and I go, oh, okay, all right,
00:00:38.860 interesting, and then I think back to how I got a letter just the other week from over 100 doctors
00:00:44.640 in Canada who say kids need to go back to school, and about at least a third of these were pediatricians
00:00:50.400 and high-ranking people from places like SickKids Hospital and so forth, and one of the arguments
00:00:54.560 they make in this letter is because coronavirus is less severe than the flu in children. That is the
00:01:02.040 conclusion that they have come to. Now, they're not saying it about elderly and so forth, and I imagine
00:01:06.260 these doctors would say that coronavirus is much more severe in the elderly than influenza, but I don't
00:01:11.380 know. There they have a sentence where they're kind of violating these Facebook guidelines. Is that
00:01:16.380 doctor's letter going to be taken down? I don't know. It just seems pretty rigid and unyielding.
00:01:22.520 This is kind of the problem when you start talking about policing things that are about a medical
00:01:26.960 issue, which is continually changing and evolving. People are still learning things about it, and
00:01:31.380 medical researchers are stepping forward with their different nuanced thoughts. Okay, speaking of
00:01:36.260 nuance, so one of the other restrictions that Facebook has put forward that I want to talk about
00:01:40.520 is they say they're going to remove posts about people who claim that the number of deaths is actually
00:01:46.280 lower than the official statistics, and or they call for more context and more information about those
00:01:54.040 deaths. This is a really bizarre rule. Now, I know there's a lot of people who talk about how exactly
00:01:59.580 your coronavirus deaths counted and so forth, and I would just like to submit to you one item that came
00:02:04.500 from a Statistics Canada report that was released the other month, and Statistics Canada researchers looked
00:02:10.140 at all the provincial data in Canada, and they concluded that eight percent of coronavirus deaths
00:02:15.180 are actually not at all coronavirus deaths. They are cancer deaths or people who have been in other
00:02:20.380 accidents and so forth who have completely died of other things, but they just happen to have tested
00:02:24.980 positive for coronavirus at the time of their death, which is how they made their way into these
00:02:29.660 statistics. Now, again, I don't know about the nuance of Facebook's rule. It seems like, you know, a pretty blunt
00:02:35.300 sentence there is a Statistics Canada report, is quoting from that Stats Canada report that says, well, actually,
00:02:41.540 eight percent of these tallies that you see up on the main federal government website about total coronavirus
00:02:47.280 deaths, eight percent of those deaths are not actually coronavirus deaths, so we can take off, you know, a few
00:02:52.720 hundred and all of that. That seems to be against Facebook's rule. So, I think this whole thing, these two
00:02:57.620 examples I give, just show this idea that when you have this emerging issue that this tech giant says, well, we're going to
00:03:05.240 step in and we're going to police how you talk about it, you find yourselves not just
00:03:09.880 potentially saying we've got to shut down the right to speech from someone who wants to put forward an outright
00:03:15.460 conspiracy theory that we all agree is just plain wrong, but you can also find that you're actually punishing
00:03:21.480 people who are experts in that very issue who are trying to have nuanced
00:03:25.720 conversations. I think we've really got to pause and ask some questions about these sort of rules and guidelines that are
00:03:32.600 being put forward from some organization or I don't know who at Facebook came up with this idea that
00:03:37.680 they actually think they 100 percent know what's going on and can craft these rules, but they actually
00:03:43.320 don't know what's going on. There's a lot of nuance out there, and they are the ones who are actually
00:03:48.300 completely ignorant of it, and perhaps they are even the ones who are peddling the misinformation.
00:03:53.200 Thank you so much, thanks.